LG announces G3 Beat, flagship phone’s younger brother

We’ve seen it in a variety of leaks so far, but it’s now finally official — say hello to LG G3 Beat, a smaller version of LG’s G3 flagship phone. Let’s take a look at what it packs, shall we?

It offers the same “Floating Arc” metallic design as its bigger brother, and has a 5-inch display trapped in a chassis with minimal bezel. It overall looks like a scaled-down G3, just as you’d expect.

Since we’ve covered specs extensively in a follow-up post, let’s go over the basics for now. As mentioned earlier, there’s a 5-inch display, but this phone is unfortunately quite the midranger. That display is an IPS unit, with a 720p resolution. There’s a quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 SoC clocked at 1.2 GHz, 8GB of ROM, 1GB of RAM, and other specs that leave us longing for a mini phone like the Sony Xperia Z1 Compact.

Laser Autofocus has been carried over from the G3 for the 8MP camera, as have Touch & Shoot and Gesture Shot. The Smart Keyboard is also present, as is QuickMemo+.

You can grab yourself an LG G3 Beat in South Korea on July 18, and a global rollout will follow afterward. It will be known as the LG G3 S in Europe and some other markets. Anyone looking to grab one?